BIG ANIMALS 255 



such as the Cretaceous, or the Oolite, or the Triassic ; 

 and the Secondary period, once more, though itself of 

 positively appalling duration, seems but a patch (to use the 

 expressive modernism) upon the unthinkable and unreali- 

 sable vastness of the endless successive Primary asons. So 

 that in the end we can only say, like Michael Scott's 

 mystic head, ' Time was, Time is, Time will be.' The 

 time we know affords us no measure at all for even the 

 nearest and briefest epochs of the time we know not ; and 

 the time we know not seems to demand still vaster and 

 more inexpressible figures as we pry back curiously, with 

 wondering eyes, into its dimmest and earliest recesses. 



These efforts to realise the unrealisable make one's 

 head swim ; let us hark back once more from cosmical time 

 to the puny bigness of our earthly animals, living or extinct. 



If we look at the whole of our existing fauna, marine 

 and terrestrial, we shall soon see that we could bring to- 

 gether at the present moment a very goodly collection of 

 extant monsters, most parlous monsters, too, each about as 

 fairly big in its own kind as almost anything that has ever 

 preceded it. Every age has its own specialiU in the way 

 of bigness ; in one epoch it is the lizards that take sud- 

 denly to developing overgrown creatures, the monarchs of 

 creation in their little day ; in another, it is the fishes that 

 blossom out unexpectedly into Titanic proportions ; in a 

 third, it is the sloths or the proboscideans that wax fat and 

 kick with gigantic members ; in a fourth, it may be the birds 

 or the men that are destined to evolve with future ages 

 into veritable rocs or purely realistic Gargantuas or Brob- 

 dingnagians. The present period is most undoubtedly the 

 period of the cetaceans ; and the future geologist who goes 

 hunting for dry bones among the ooze of the Atlantic, now 

 known to us only by the scanty dredgings of our ' Alerts ' 

 and ' Challengers,' but then upheaved into snow-clad Alps 



